Queer Ecologies ϟ Digital Planes

Join Millicent Hawk and a collaborator for a presentation on distinctive non-human ecologies. As a group we will follow with an open discussion of their potential to help us navigate the intersections of sexuality and terrain - whether analogue or digital, organic or mechanic.

Can non-human ecologies help us to think about forms of regenerative simulations and narratives to position us in relation to technology and non-human entities with which we are interdependent? As a group we will look at John Conway’s ‘Game of Life’, an autonomous digital ecology, as well as non-binary aquatic life forms.

Three unusual aquatic life forms - a ‘pond scum’ with up to seven sexes (Tetrahymena thermophila), a transgender algae (Volvox), and the immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) - offer alternative ecological perspectives to human kind. Can aspects of non-human ecologies combine with digital systems to shift thinking beyond binary bias?

Rather than a distancing effect - where being digitally ‘connected’ can counter-intuitively have the opposite outcome - could programming intimacy and interconnection in code narrow the distance between analogue worlds and digital planes?